I assure you that we aren't doing that. The whole point of making them visible to everyone is to remove how much of a pain it was back in 1.X to hunt for the emblems. I'm positive nobody wants to go back to that.

Ahh. Yes, that's definitely going to be the case. Making a scavenger hunt where Sonic can get to every location would make hunting as Tails and Knuckles really boring. You will have to use different characters to reach all the emblems, but if you reach an emblem as one character, you will never have to switch characters to actually collect it.

Some of them are for record attack, but the rest of them are just colored to make it easier to explain which one you're talking about when discussing them. It's a lot easier to talk about "the red emblem in GFZ1" than "the emblem in the cave with the Armageddon Shield in GFZ1".